⚡ Here’s something worth knowing: When it comes to developing healthcare’s future leaders, where someone starts matters more than you might think. Certain positions—think of them like baseball’s catcher—are remarkably good at building C-suite skills.
📊 The Trend
At this year’s American Society of Anesthesiologists’ ADVANCE 2025 conference, something interesting came up: more and more anesthesiologists are moving into executive roles. Dr. Aalok Agarwala, an anesthesiologist who’s now associate CMO at Mass General, put it this way: “Across the country, we’re seeing more anesthesiologists stepping into hospital executive roles.”
Which got me thinking—what’s special about anesthesiology that seems to breed executives? Turns out, the answer might come from baseball, of all places.
⚾ The Catcher Hypothesis
In their Harvard Business Review article “Making Mobility Matter,” consultants Haig Nalbantian and Rick Guzzo introduced a provocative idea they called the “catcher hypothesis.” It challenges conventional thinking about how leadership talent is identified and cultivated within organizations. Get this: Of baseball’s 30 field managers back in 2008, twelve were former catchers. That’s wild when you consider catchers make up maybe 10% of any team. The odds of that happening randomly? Less than one in a thousand.
Why do catchers make such good managers? Look at what they do:
- They’re the only ones who see the whole field
- They’re constantly coordinating defensive strategies
- They handle difficult personalities (ever met a pitcher?)
- Split-second decisions are their bread and butter
- They juggle a dozen things at once
The job itself shapes the leader.
Now think about anesthesiologists. Every day they’re watching the entire OR, working with multiple teams, making life-or-death calls in seconds, juggling patient safety with keeping things moving, and dealing with stressed surgeons and nurses. Dr. Agarwala nailed it when he said their OR experience—”that teamwork collaboration with direct patient care”—translates surprisingly well to the executive suite.
🏥 Healthcare’s Catcher Positions
But here’s the thing—anesthesiology isn’t healthcare’s only “catcher position.” Several roles build similar skills:
Emergency docs basically live at the crossroads of the entire hospital. They’re triaging on the fly while working with every department you can name. Talk about learning resource management under pressure.
Hospitalists are like air traffic controllers for inpatient care. They work across specialties, manage patient flow, and actually understand both the clinical and business sides of things—exactly what you need in leadership.
Quality and patient safety folks have to see how everything connects. They speak both doctor and administrator, and they’ve learned to make decisions based on data, not just gut feeling.
And it’s not just physicians. Nursing supervisors running multiple units learn operations and people management simultaneously. (Notice how many CNOs are becoming CEOs lately? That’s not an accident.) Pharmacy directors work with every clinical department while managing complex supply chains. Case management leaders are constantly bridging clinical, financial, and operational worlds.
🎯 Strategic Questions for Your Healthcare Organization
This isn’t just interesting trivia—it actually matters for your talent strategy. Ask yourself:
✓ Which jobs in your organization force people to work across departments and manage different stakeholders?
✓ Are the roles that prep someone for CMO different from those leading to CEO? (Spoiler: probably yes)
✓ How do you give high-potentials time in these roles without constantly shuffling people around?
✓ What “catcher positions” are you overlooking because they don’t fit the traditional mold?
The HBR research offers an important caution with a real-world example: a large consumer products company tried rotating managers every 16 months to “develop” them. What actually happened? Nobody stayed in place long enough to see their decisions play out, accountability went out the window, and quality problems ended up costing them over a billion dollars a year. The takeaway: it’s not about constant movement—it’s about putting people in the right developmental roles and giving them time to actually learn.
🚀 Building Your Leadership Strategy
Smart organizations don’t leave this stuff to chance. They figure out which roles naturally develop leaders, build those positions into career paths, support people through these challenging assignments, and understand that time in these roles pays dividends later.
But here’s the catch (no pun intended!)—you need real data to figure out which positions actually develop leaders (versus which ones just seem like they should). And what works at Cleveland Clinic might not work at your community hospital. This is where we come in at CPLE—we can help healthcare organizations dig into their own data, spot their unique catcher positions, and build development paths that actually make sense for their physician and non-physician leaders.
Here’s what it comes down to: Those anesthesiologists landing in the C-suite? They’re not flukes. They’re evidence that certain clinical roles can be leadership incubators. Every healthcare organization has these catcher positions. The real question is whether you know what yours are—and whether you’re using them strategically.
💡 Curious about your organization’s hidden leadership developers? Let’s talk about using workforce analytics to build a stronger bench.
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